Climate Effects of El Niño and La Niña
So that we can talk numerically about more rain than normal and less rain than normal, we have chosen to talk about terciles. So we take all the rainfall amounts for a given season and in a particular location, sort them, and split into three equal groups: the lower tercile having the smallest amounts, the middle tercile having the middle amounts, and the upper tercile having the largest amounts. Admittedly, in some places this makes no sense: in the desert where it almost never rains, it is hard to distinguish between the lower and middle terciles, for example, and we may end up putting all the zero precipitation amounts in the middle tercile.
El Niño and Precipitation Terciles
Station Data: NOAA NCDC GCPS (monthly)
La Niña and Precipitation Terciles
Station Data: NOAA NCDC GCPS (monthly)
